


It's Always Darkest Before The Dawn

by notabadday



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-02
Updated: 2017-05-14
Packaged: 2018-10-14 02:09:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 4,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10526664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notabadday/pseuds/notabadday
Summary: One night changes Fitz's life forever.He’s wondering how he got there. How he went from being on top of the world to sitting on a cold, hard linoleum floor in all blue scrubs, with his knees tucked up tight to his chest. Tight, too tight to breathe.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This diverges from canon with regard to what happened with Fitz's dad. I started it long before that was established in the show. In all other regards, it's canon compliant and set later. Odd chapters are set in the present, even chapters are... not.

He’s wondering how he got there. How he went from being on top of the world to sitting on a cold, hard linoleum floor in all blue scrubs, with his knees tucked up tight to his chest. Tight, too tight to breathe.

 The last time he can remember feeling so alone was the night his dad died.

 His mum had decided he was too young to be at the hospice so he’d had to stay in a neighbor’s spare room, all pastel floral walls and the eye-watering scent of lavender burning in his nostrils. He’d swallowed the instinct for an argument about it. He understood the role he had been forced into. Without anyone ever wording it directly, he could diagnose the situation from the pitying expressions of little-seen relatives and hushed conversations half-overheard.

 There was a quiet understanding that the tectonic plates on which his life rested were shifting, and things were destined not to end up where they began. They were on the precipice of a great unknown, made up of only a few small certainties. His father would be gone. His mother would be changed. And he would never become the person he was shaping up to be; he’d be someone else, better or worse. The broken boy, with a heart full of hero-worship and no way to set it free.

 The neighbor who’d taken him in as his father’s illness came to its cruel conclusion was a friendly old lady from just across the street. She carried that furious lavender scent with her and had what seemed to be an endless supply of Rich Tea biscuits and Cadbury Eclairs; that’s what Fitz remembered most vividly. That, and the knowledge that he’d have liked her a lot more if she’d had a pet. A longhaired sausage dog to warm her feet, or a fat cat to lie possessively along the line of the sofa. Instead she lived alone but for her temporary houseguest.

 She had sat the once-precocious little boy down with a milky hot chocolate and a biscuit to tell him his father had passed away, so he would be going home soon. Fitz didn’t say a word and it felt inappropriate, an extraordinary kind of impolite, to cry in front of an almost stranger.

 Uncomfortable in the airless silence, she had pushed the biscuit tin across the table towards him. “You have as many of these as you like, sweetheart,” as his well-meaning neighbor gestured to the custard creams wasn’t quite the comfort he needed.

 He’d pretended he was prepared for it, that he was brave and grown up. Then he’d disappeared upstairs without a fuss, closed the door and sank down against the wall the moment the door latch clicked. That evening drowned in tears.

 Body sunk, heart sunk, now he’s that 11-year-old boy all over again. Sad, angry, confused and achingly alone. His eyes are burning but it’s no worse than his throat, and nothing compared to his chest.

 The energy to fend off dark thoughts and the very deepest of worries has faded. They are an avalanche. There’s no one to remind him that they’ve overcome worse odds, no one to hold his hands until they still, no one to distract him with obscure scientific theories; there’s no one at all because his whole world is Jemma Simmons, and she can’t be here for this.

 He’s crushed under the weight of it all just coming and coming and coming.

 And then he’s numb.


	2. Chapter 2

“You’re going to start to feel a numbness,” a benevolent voice speaks with forced warmth, as though consciously trying to soften the clinical formality of her message. The doctor carries an air of vague confidence that Fitz finds reassuring and Jemma finds irksome.

She winces just slightly at the pain of the needle, locking eyes with her husband for an instant burst of relief. She’s blocking out the squeaky footsteps of unfamiliar medical personnel and the uneven beeping of machines and the stench of disinfectant. By necessity, this fresh and soundless world narrows to just him and her. And the half-made him or her that brought them here.

 Fitz is miraculously calm about it all. It’s as though he’s understood what she needs from him, he’s accepted his own impotence, and he’s going to push every natural instinct of panic out of his mind to do all that he can do: support her, with love pouring from his pores and doubts dulled to mute. One hand strokes her mussed hair with absent-minded affection while the other is gripped ever more tightly by hers. Her nails, recently clipped during a final prenatal pamper day at Daisy’s behest, pierce the skin inside his fingers and he grimaces to endure it silently. Even his grimace is suppressed when her eyes flick up to his face.

 “You’re doing so well, Jem,” he says at endearingly frequent intervals. Her eyelashes thicken with an abundance of heavy tears at the sound of his voice, brimming with pride and awe. “ _So_ well.”

 When they’re alone again for a brief moment, doctors and nurses having dispersed to attend to tasks elsewhere, Jemma draws him closer. There’s something comically conspiratorial about the way she narrows the distance between them and it makes him smile. Being closer to Jemma usually has that effect. There’s comfort to be found in the constant of that simple truth.

 “Fitz?” she asks in a soft singsong. His name is a delicate, precious single syllable to be handled with utmost care.

 He moves closer to enter the intimate little sphere into which he’s been invited, speaking in the same gentle, melodic tone as hers. “Jem?”

 His fingers tickle along her forehead as he affectionately brushes but a few stray hairs from her face. Now in extreme close-up, her eyes watch him with childlike curiosity.

 “This wasn’t the plan. It’s not what we planned... in the plan.”

 “When does anything ever go to plan with us?” he replies as he moves a comforting hand to her cheek, his thumb gently brushing back and forth in soothing motions.

 “I know I can do this, Fitz, but…” Fixed between her reluctance and compulsion to continue, she looks over his expression with sharp focus, examining every twitch his face gives away in an attempt to catch his disappointment. Disapproval that perhaps she’s not so brave after all. She readies herself for the look, that look he’ll have in his eye when she confesses herself fallible, even weak.

 He passes the preliminary tests with an easy smile, so she continues. “I need you… I need you to remind me I can do this, okay?”

 “Don’t you remember?” he starts, a breeziness to his tone that’s real and fake in equal measure. “You’re the one who survived hell, the one who saved us both from drowning, who cured herself of an incurable alien virus. We’re good together but, my god, Jem… you, _just you_ … you’re spectacular. And this’ll be nothing. Compared to what you’re capable of, _this_ , it’s nothing.”

 After a pause, his eyes convincing her where his words might not, he adds, “It might not be a good time to tell you, but if I hadn’t already seen your bloodwork, it would be my very well educated hypothesis that you were… well, some kind of superhero. Like, you don’t even need powers. You could just be one. Just you.”

 She breathes out, and then smiles a bright beam that could put the sun to shame. An even voice replacing her shaky tone, she quietly replies, “I’d have to get an outfit.”

 “Okay, we need to finish getting you prepped,” a nurse says loudly, bursting into the room as though from nowhere, approaching the opposite side of Jemma’s bed to where Fitz is. “And you’ll need to get changed into these,” she adds, offering him a folded pile of hospital blue polycotton fabric.

 “Just my color,” he replies, as though it’s freshly washed laundry or a crisp new shirt, as though it’s ordinary and okay.


	3. Chapter 3

Fitz is too lost inside his own head to notice the blots of deep red that stain his hospital blues. He doesn’t take notice of his hands as they tremble violently at his sides. He’s numb to the strain in his throat that catches his breath. Tears pool at his neck unfelt.

 It’s only once a whole-body physical reaction takes hold that Fitz is pulled from his memories. Those saccharine snapshots of sweet Sundays. His head splinters into a thousand moments, scattered throughout history, their history and his own, any part of it that detaches him from the present. His thoughts are rapt with the little joys and heartbreaks that brought him to the brink of their last moment together.

 When he’s jolted forward, he’s looking down on himself on the floor of a hospital corridor. He’s transcended numb and split in two: physical and incorporeal. He can see himself, childlike and heaving for a breath, and he can hear the distant sound of voices echoing from the nurse’s station just around the corner.

 Fitz’s struggle for breath becomes a vocal cry, building to a desperate noise that bears out from the very base of him.

 It’s a signal.

 That’s how he’s found. 

A nurse pushes a paper bag over his mouth, urging him with a professional calmness, “Breathe into this… Out… And in.” Another one restrains him as the first rubs soothing circles across his back like she’s done this a thousand times before. He feels like a young child who’s grazed his knee, his mother absently providing tactile comfort as she waits for his cries to settle down. There’s no fussing. It’s a simple business, founded on the principle that after the requisite amount of comforting, he’ll be obliged to recover – or feign it, at least.

 The nurse with a hand on his back takes in the view of his scrubs, damp at the collar with faint browning bloodstains scattered across the pale fabric. He feels her eyes on him but offers no explanation.

 Breathing is a start. Words would be getting ahead of himself.

 When she takes the bag away from his mouth, the two nurses seem unperturbed by the volume of Fitz’s cries, or by the powerful fury with which he’s sobbing out for a wife and child he’s longing to hold. They are named and unnamed respectively.

 “You shouldn’t be here,” he hears, like an echoed voice breaking off a dream. “Why don’t you come with us to a private room?”

 He’s easily steered, almost carried by the steady hands on his back, to a room they put aside for friends and family. It’s all grey sofas and soft toys, a half-built Lego palace in the centre of a coffee table. He wonders what happened to its architect and whether it was good news or bad news that distracted them from their toy-building project.

 The soft-voiced nurses, so natural in their care and so stoic in the face of his evident distress, guide him to a seat. They never say the words, “Calm down.” But he does.

 Tears can’t be stopped but his breaths even out, only hitching intermittently.

 “I can’t live without her,” escapes him more than once. Each time it’s more desperate than the last.

 One of the nurses – and he can’t even tell which, their features blurred in the periphery of his thoughts of Jemma – offers to see what she can find out for him. She’s gone before he can thank her with even a little glance of recognition, but he looks up in time to watch the door close.


	4. Chapter 4

They’re rushing to the front door grabbing keys, phones and scarves with inhuman agility as they shuffle out of the house. Following behind Jemma, Fitz’s scarf trails after him and catches in the door as he pulls it shut, causing him to trip backwards and have to repeat the action.

 She’d giggle if she weren’t so nervous. Instead, she continues walking to their car, that new little yellow hatchback already kitted out with a baby seat in the back and additional safety features courtesy of some very over-cautious parents. The fluffy stuffed toy monkey hanging from the rear-view mirror swings a little at the motion of the door opening and it catches her attention, drawing a therapeutic deep breath out of her. With her hands on the frame of the door, she slides in slowly and looks from Fitz to her lit-up phone.

 He double checks the lock on the house door and follows along, a spring in his step as he climbs into the driver’s seat swiftly to make up the time on Jemma.

 “We can’t be late,” she says, waving her phone in his direction even though the lockscreen has already gone back to black by the time she does.

 It’s his turn to be the assured one for once, insisting, “We’ve got time. When have I ever let you down?”

 She’s appeased instantly, giving a subtle nod to concede on this one. It turns out jumping through a hole in the galaxy earns big points.

 As Fitz starts the engine, Jemma goes quiet. She’s looking out of the passenger window, a head full of dreams, as she absent-mindedly rests her hands over her bump. It’s at once possessive and loving. The stillness of her palm alerts Fitz, only out of the corner of his eye, to her uneasiness. Usually, her hand will move in sweet, slow motions for endless hours at a time, as though rubbing in moisturizer – which sometimes she is.

 When they get stopped at a set of traffic lights, he reaches over to touch her thigh and it prompts her to move her own hand to flatly cover his. Her fingers gently weaving between his, she brings their clutched hands up to her face and kisses his knuckles just as he begins to accelerate at green.

 “Sorry. Am I being a total nightmare?” she asks, wincing as she turns to face him.

 He squeezes her leg lightly. “You’re nothing but a dream,” he reassures her, a serene quality to his tone that dances over the words.

 Noticing how markedly out of character this sudden equanimity is, Jemma remarks, “When did you become the calm one?”

 “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve always been the calm one.” He shoots a glance to her to indulge an eye-roll. “Your doctor and my mother–”

 “Oh, Fitz!” she spits with the same playful fury as always.

 “–have… Your doctor and my mother have suggested that I minimize your exposure to any kind of stressful situations, including, but not limited to, my own agitation over any number of daily events.”

 “Fitz!”

 “Are you finding this stressful?”

 “No!” she fires back, a little too forcefully for it to be convincing. Unusually for them, they both let a silence play out briefly before Jemma continues, softer.

“Fitz, no, I… I don’t find you stressful. You’re ridiculous, certainly. You do any number of things in a day that I find unnecessary and bizarre. Sometimes you can be infuriating but… it’s all just… you, isn’t it?

 “I don’t want you to change. Not for me, not for the world.”

 He’s pulling up to any empty space when she finishes. He moves the car forward, taking advantage of the vacancy in front of them before turning the engine off. When he turns to face her, there’s such warmth in his expression, it would melt anyone with a heart. She lifts her hand to his cheek to draw him into a quick, loving kiss before they draw away to press their foreheads together.

 “You’re sweet for worrying,” she whispers. “I don’t want you to worry about me.”

 “I don’t want you to worry about anything.”

 “The only thing I’m worrying about is getting to this appointment on time,” she says with a laugh, pulling away from him to press the home button on her phone to light up the screen. 14:15. “Come on, we’ve got five minutes and it’s going to take me bloody ages to get up those steps.”


	5. Chapter 5

Fitz pulls his phone out to check the time. 02:15.

 It’s a strange reminder that outside of these hostile halls, things carry on as normal. Other people are sleeping soundly, obnoxiously oblivious to their good fortune. They’ll wake up in the morning and will their day away at work, book holidays, and flip through romantic prospects on Tinder. They’ll start pointless arguments and complain about parking tickets.

 They don’t have to sit in this dark and dingy hospital corridor, taunted by flickering fluorescents, wondering if they might be about to lose everything. Everything that’s worth a damn.

 There’s a long scroll of notifications beneath the time and date display on his phone, but Fitz ignores them all. It’s not Jemma.

 Unlocking it, he finds her instantly. She lights up his treasured gadget in a thousand different ways. He finds her in his messages, in his photos and his videos, in memos and in his calendar. She’s there as his background and she brightly fills the foreground of every other part of that compact device.

 He can’t stop himself from looking for her. Every app, every folder.

 He focuses in on the photographs. Wide aperture frames of broad smiles.

 The first to come up – the most recent – chronicle the gradual swelling of her stomach, updates of Jemma holding her bump in the same side-on pose almost every day. His thumb moves gently over the screen before he flicks onto the next one, a heart-melting tribute to his whole world; she’s lying on their sofa with her hair sprawled out across the arm. She’s half-asleep, with their fluffy black dog curled up on her legs, just below the baby bump.

 It brings back such a tangible memory of the scene.

 It had been a quiet Sunday afternoon, one of those magnificent, unremarkable days and they’d settled in the lounge to watch _Bundle of Joy_ for no reason other than that it was on. As soon as Fitz had sat down, she’d put her feet in his lap, and, in turn, the dog had leapt up to rest over Jemma’s legs. It had only taken 10 minutes and a gentle foot rub before she was out cold but Fitz and her precious pup had stayed dutifully still for the film’s duration.

 He can feel the phantom weight of her petite feet resting against his thighs. He can smell the wind of the dog and hear Jemma’s shallow puffs of breath over the songs on the small screen.

Unable to bear it but compelled to indulge his grief, he scrolls to another image.

 The photo stream is an endless tribute: Jemma holding their beloved Tibetan terrier in her arms wearing the “Big Sis” t-shirt that Daisy bought, a selfie of Jemma and Fitz in bed with their faces pressed intimately together for the photo, a scan of their last sonogram, Jemma posing on a walk, pictures sent from high street changing rooms trying on maternity wear, Jemma, Jemma and more Jemma. There are boomerangs of her twirling to show off her bump and videos of the dog with Jemma’s warm laugh bursting from the speaker.

 He decides to shoot to the very top of his cloud history, transporting himself years back in time to see their oldest photos. The grid previews an infinity of Jemma, never letting up no matter how far back he journeys. The oldest of memories capture monogrammed lab coats and friendly eye rolls, frozen in time as the surviving artifacts of the time of his life.

 Jemma’s in the very first image on his phone, smiling in that blinding, heart-stopping way that she always does.


	6. Chapter 6

“Why are you smiling at me like that?” Fitz asks, immediately suspicious when she greets him at their front door. There’s a twinkle in her eye, a secret in her tight-lipped, lipsticked smile.

 They don’t linger in the arch of the doorway.

 She doesn’t give him much of a chance to wonder at her immediate presence. She doesn’t let him appreciate the curls in her hair or the lace edge of her top, despite all the thought she’s put into both. Without delay, Jemma leads him by the hand to their dimly lit, miraculously tidy lounge.

 She has him pushed back onto their sofa, his legs between hers, before she says a single word. Straddling his lap in a lascivious pose, eventually she gives a nonchalant, “Like what?”

 Inevitably, Fitz has forgotten his question. He watches her wait for him to burst out laughing, nervous and awkward. But every bit of humor has been sucked from the room.

 “That grin,” Fitz thinks aloud, his voice deep and gruff.

 Jemma shifts closer on his lap until her chest is almost flat against his. He responds by moving his hands down her back, slowing as he smoothly feels over her hips. Her smile fades; her eyes fix on his.

 Hands gently pulling his shirt from his pants, as though he might not notice, Jemma breaks the silence. “How was your day?”

 Her suggestive tone is undisguised by the mundane question. The casual query does little to cool the heat between them. Every syllable is low and long, spoken with lips almost brushing against his cheek. The tease of her breath on his skin, tingling beneath the surface, stirs the response she’s looking for. She pulls her top over her head with a seductive slowness, discarding it carelessly as Fitz gazes awestruck at the new lingerie that has been revealed: red and lacy and on for its rather unforgettable premiere.

 His hands move over the bare skin of her back and he leans forward to press a series of kisses across her chest. She moans a little and shifts ever closer as her fingers move absently through his hair with rough encouragement.

 “Fuck, I missed you,” he says breathlessly.

 Jemma’s eyes close. “We can make up for that now, if you like.”

 When she leans back, she manages to remove her bra and pull him into a kiss in a single smooth motion. With a flat-palmed grip on her still-clothed buttocks, Fitz lifts them both from their seated position to lay Jemma out on the sofa as she fights to get his shirt open. Once it is, her hands move appreciatively to his chest before sliding over his shoulders and letting it fall away.

 Pants are off before they dare catch their breath. There are matching red, lacy panties to follow Jemma’s earlier reveal, though their moment is short-lived. Fitz pulls them down, replacing whatever warmth they might have offered with his own. His tongue begins to tease, drawing out a low moan. Before he can find a rhythm, before he’s able to truly indulge the optimal cadence for her pleasure, she pulls him up early and brings his lips to meet hers.

 While he’s distracted in their kiss, she takes a hold of him. It’s decisive and determined. “Focus,” she whispers, barely above a breath.

 As always, Jemma’s wish is his command. Her mouth opens in a silent gasp as he moves slowly inside of her.

 “Maybe that was it,” Jemma says with self-conscious eagerness as they lie satiated and tangled along their couch. Naked still and glowing, Jemma’s body is resting languidly over Fitz’s, her index finger drawing circles on his chest and tracing lines through a patch of light hair.

 Fitz kisses her forehead. “It was definitely something.”

 “It might not happen straight away,” she adds with urgency, her words tinged with an unmistakable desperation that breaks his heart just a little.

 “I know, but,” he tucks a lock of hair behind her ear, “practice makes perfect babies, as they say.”

 Jemma snuggles closer into him, resting her head on his chest before turning to softly drop an affectionate kiss just there. Though her expression is serious, without warning it breaks into a warm, broad smile as she gazes up at her husband’s face. He’s got a charming little worry line forming and his lips are tight, but his eyes are loving and open as ever.

 Jemma doesn’t notice the tear escape her eye before she says, “Practice could be fun.”

 Pouting his bottom lip, he nods and shrugs.

 She’s laughing with him when his thumb brushes away the teardrop on her cheek.


End file.
